October 12th 2008

I have a vegan friend who, so distraught at the notion that committing suicide might contravene his veganism, actually went ahead, shotgunned his head to herbivorous chunks, and was even shunned by the devil. His betrayal of his beliefs was deemed so thorny and yet inevitable that he was transmogrified into an abbatoir lorry and forced for eternity to drive himself around a Moebeus Strip hewn of a tapeworm. I tried to contact him as to how he felt about this, and despite being as extra-dimensionally multiversal as anyone could hope for at this juncture in my life, he was just that bit removed from my perceptive field. So, I sent a pigeon. And quickly learned that a true vegan, after having contracted pubic lice, would retain them forever, unless he shaved from head-to-toe, which even then was tantamount to deforestation, forcing the lice into vagrancy and indirectly promoting squatting, or at worse, merely delaying the inevitable - they would die anyway. I have another vegan friend who upon having contracted the lice, meticulously plucked them off with felt-tipped tweezers and housed them in a self-built sanctuary which he'd had feng-shui-ed, and was, I gather, based on one of Christopher Wren's earlier works, only marginally scaled down. For the housewarming I turned up with a hamper stuffed to the gills with veal, foie gras, which I'd left unrefrigerated to fester in the hamper for a month prior to the party. Fortunately, my vegan friend saw the humour, even as I slammed his head facedown into the hamper, for him to emerge pasted in maggots and half-decomposed unethical sweetmeats. It was a good party. The pubic lice proved surprisingly good dancers, even within their perspex palace - albeit one escaped and burrowed into the microscopic grooves in the skin just above my navel. As I slept that night, it occured to me that to have contracted even a single pubic louse from a dear friend was not dissimilar to having quenched our thirst on the same can of coke and regarding it a kiss. So, having fantasised over my vegan friend for many years - I had to force-believe he were carnivorous for the ejaculate not to be utterly translucent - I masturbated over the thought of us having shared a pubic louse. The next morning, hurried to the pharmacy, bought a tonne of insecticide, ran home, poured it into a tin of creosote, mixed them, and coated myself utterly in this elixir homebrew, plonked myself on the lawn to dry, turning at intervals so as to dry both sides equally. Upon being satisfied that I'd killed the louse and stopped time with the application of the creosote - the passage of time, naturally, being marked only by interruption to a void, friction, entropy, et al - I shaved my head, rammed the hair in the freezer, with the intention of having it made into a wig once my hairline started receding in old age, and paid a visit to the vegan friend from whom I'd obtained the louse. He was lounging in the garden on a wicker chaise-longue, and bare;y registered my approach until I lit my fingertips and ran screaming, flaming, at him, screeching 'Look what you've done, you hideous mekon bastard.'. I convinced him that the only way to reverse my predicament - although by then already, the flames were eating through the creosote, and my skin - was to eat his dog. Months later, after extensive and experimental cosmetic surgery, in which time I grew back skin, he paid a visit to the hospital, his dog's name-tag hung around his neck like a cheap aluminium requiem, and apologized for having caused so much torment by refusing to have sex with me back then when we were sixteen. I absolved him of blame as he knelt before the hospital bed and fellated me, the dog-tag flapping against my scrotum, as I lay back, contented, awaiting delivery of my wig.

I love autumn. It owns a very specific light. The light, diaphanous diffuse, as weightless as the blink of a butterfly wing, ebbs through my basement window with grace, contrary to the way that summer light pants and penetrates. I can coexist with autumn light quite happily. Particularly in the morning, the light seems to be expressly visible, present, beyond merely illuminating obstacles, objects. I've noticed upon casually photographing the crescent garden beyond my window, that in the autumn mornings, 'light' dwells more in the realm of the noun than the verb. It doesn't just light; there it is: tangible light. A character in its own right rather than an assisting function. Breathe it in.